In the recent past, computing devices have increased in functionality and storage capacity while decreasing in cost. Accordingly, more and more people have access to computing devices that are capable of performing a myriad of tasks. Example tasks include document creation and editing; photograph, audio and/or video creation and editing; tracking investments; creation and editing of presentations; Internet browsing; amongst many other tasks.
Furthermore, many individuals who create content are becoming interested in sharing such content with others. For example, many individuals that create videos now desire to share such videos with others, wherein the videos may be accessible by way of the Internet, for example. In another example, individuals that publish scholarly articles may wish to have such articles published and accessible to the entire world. In yet another example, various online communities allow participants (“authors”) to post messages to a server that is connected to the Internet, wherein the messages are available for consumption by one or more software programs. Examples of such communities include web-based message forums, e-mail discussion lists, blogs, wikis, amongst others. Many of these message forums indicate topics of message threads, and allow authors to write messages with respect to these topics. Furthermore, authors can reply to other author's messages, wherein such messages can be referred to as “reply-to” messages.
The proliferation of online communicates has resulted in a very large amount of end-user authored data. For instance, every day participants can add new content concerning a variety of topics. As message threads become larger and more and more authors post information to a message thread, however, efficiently locating data may be challenging. For instance, even though a message thread may initially be directed at a certain topic, over time or at certain instances in time additional, different topics or sub-topics may arise. A user that may be interested in one or more of the different topics or sub-topics may never know such topics have been discussed in a particular message thread. In another example, the user may spend an inordinate amount of time searching for information in a message thread.